DONALD LIPSKI HAS A PASSION FOR PUBLIC ART

Donald Lipski’s book-based installation is the first of four public artworks for the new downtown library

Public art commissions being installed in the new Central Library

Donald Lipski, “Hiding My Candy” (auditorium): Lipski is an East Coast-based artist with a number of public works on high-visibility sites, including New York’s Central Park and Grand Central Terminal. His San Diego installation is his first here and his fourth library work (he has pieces in libraries in Denver, Minneapolis and Kansas City, Mo.).

Einar and Jamex de la Torre, title TBD (first-floor elevator bay): The regionally based de la Torre brothers, who work on both sides of the border, will create an assemblage of glass (their signature material), photomontage and found objects.

Gary Hill, title TBD (fourth floor): Born in California and now based in Seattle, Hill is one of the pioneers of video art, and his installation will involve three pairs of video monitors (arranged as if an open book). As for the content of the monitors, that is probably still evolving.

Roy McMakin, title TBD (reading room): A graduate of UC San Diego, the Seattle-based artist has frequently shown in San Diego (including a solo show at Quint Contemporary Art) and is also working on a public art piece for the airport expansion. For the library, he’s creating unique pieces of furniture.

Artist Donald Lipski is installing a work of art that covers a wall at the new downtown Library. The piece of art includes thousands of books attached to the wall.

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Artist Donald Lipski is installing a work of art that covers a wall at the new downtown Library. The piece of art includes thousands of books attached to the wall.

Donald Lipski has plenty of works in museums, from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He’s enjoyed an international reputation and considerable respect as an artist since his “Gathering Dust,” an early installation where he pinned thousands of tiny sculptures to a wall, garnered widespread attention at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late ’70s.

But Lipski, now 66, has a special affection for the more than two dozen pieces he’s made for public spaces.

“It’s very different from doing work that ends up in museums or is shown in galleries, where people come to have an art experience,” Lipski said. “There’s just something wonderful about doing work that people will just come across — not when they are going to look for art, but when they are just having their life.

“And you can impact that somehow.”

Lipski was in San Diego last week installing “Hiding My Candy,” the first of four public artworks commissioned by the city for the new San Diego Central Library. Lipski’s piece is an assemblage of several thousand open books overlaid with a wire mesh. It covers the east wall in the library’s new auditorium.

“At first that sounds like a one-liner: you staple a book to a wall,” said Rob Wellington Quigley, ﻿the architect of the new library, which is scheduled for a late September opening. “And yet when he does it, it has this incredible richness. It’s a really exciting piece. I think he’s a great artist.”

Solving problems

The idea of using books, although an obvious topic for a library, just happened to be something Lipski was exploring when he submitted several proposals to the city in 2003.

“Like most people in my generation, I grew up with a real affection for books,” Lipski said. “My sister is a librarian and our house was filled with books. Now, it’s a time when (the role of) books — although still central to what a library is — is different. Information is more easily accessible other ways.”

Over the past decade, he’s drilled holes in books, combined them with other materials, even used them as building blocks, as in “Good as Gold,” his installation at the Kansas City Public Library in Missouri (he also has pieces in the public libraries of Denver and Minneapolis).

For San Diego, he suggested several book-based projects, including creating a nook in the children’s reading room constructed of books formed in the shape of the iconic California Tower in Balboa Park, but that idea was passed over in favor of his wall of books in the auditorium, which not only enhances the room’s aesthetic appeal, but solves an architectural issue.

“A curved wall is very difficult to deal with acoustically,” Quigley said. “And the piece he devised is a sound-absorbing piece. So he actually solved a very practical acoustical problem at the same time as doing his art, which I thought was pretty ingenious.”

Installing “Hiding My Candy” had special challenges in that the arrangement of books on the wall has to look “as random as it possibility can,” Lipski said. But creating randomness is not as easy at it might seem.

“It’s a process of creating something that looks totally random when it’s every step of the way planned out,” said “creative project manager” John Grant, who describes his job as transforming Lipski’s two-dimensional plans and images into three-dimensional realities. “One of the difficult things in life is making things look unordered but pleasing. Nature does a really good job of that. For us, it’s much, much harder.”

Under that seeming randomness, Lipski has been exacting about the size, color and paper quality of the books, which he bought new from a book wholesaler who deals in remainders. The titles are incidental (ranging from pop psychology to the memoir of a female impersonator) and will be hidden, as the covers of the books are against the wall.

“I see it as a minimalist work, but at the same time one that’s filled with details,” Lipski said. “It’s almost like looking at something decidedly not minimalist, like a Jackson Pollock painting, where the overall thing is just sort of a field, but that field is full of detail that’s really rich.”

The books are protected by a stainless steel protective mesh, although Lipski thinks maybe the mesh is protecting the public from the books.

“It could be the idea that information is dangerous, in some sense, like a WikiLeaks sort of thing, and that people need to be protected from words or ideas,” Lipski said. “But I like the idea that in art, like poetry, things are put out there and people will make their own metaphors and come away with their own ideas.”

Strong effects

Changing people’s lives is a key element in Lipski’s art. He wants it to be beautiful, but more than that, he wants it to be evocative, to make people think.

“It’s not like I have something to profess or a message to get across,” Lipski said. “I just want people to do more than walk by it and think it’s beautiful.”

He achieved that in a recent work, “Ship of Pearl,” which was installed in May on the pediment of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston. Although a carving of St. Paul had originally been planned for the pediment, the church ran out of money and the prominent space remained empty — for 194 years.

Lipski conceived a form made out of aluminum that resembles a chambered nautilus and set it against a blue background.

One woman who saw the piece had an email exchange with the cathedral’s dean, who shared it with Lipski.

After seeing the piece for the first time, the woman wrote, she got on a bus and was approached by a “slightly deranged” man who got in her face and exclaimed, “I’m a sinner!”

As the former schoolteacher explained to the dean, “I’m an elderly woman and I’m not particularly brave, and normally I would just sort of avoid eye contact and turn the other way. But I looked him in the face and I said, ‘It’s a beautiful world, and certainly there’s a place in it for you.’ ”

“Isn’t that something?” Lipski said. “So it certainly had an effect on her. As a sculptor doing art in public, this is what it’s all made of.”